Do you remember The Flashing Blade? You'd need to be of a certain age, I guess, and to have grown up in the UK, but basically it was the background music to every long, six week school holiday in the 1970s. As soon as the holidays rolled around, the BBC would wheel out a children's TV schedule for the weekdays to keep the little horrors entertained. And it was always the same schedule, it seemed. It would consist of seemingly endless loops of Why Don't You?, Robinson Crusoe, White Horses and of course The Flashing Blade.
Most of the others didn't interest me much, but a swashbuckling action series with swords and explosions and lots of riding around for no good reason? Sign me up! I used to love The Flashing Blade, and can still recite the lyrics to the theme tune word perfect to this day:
You've got to fight for what you want
For all that you believe.
It's right to fight for what you want
To live the way you please.
As long as we have done our best
Then no-one can do more.
And life and love and happiness
Are well worth fighting for.
I was vaguely aware at the time that it was dubbed and that it seemed to be set in some obscure war that we were never taught at school, where the French were fighting the Spanish and the French were, amazingly, the good guys, but not much else.
So in a fit of nostalgia a week or so ago I went and ordered the two-set DVD of the series from Amazon. It consists of 12 episodes, the last of which the BBC never showed for some reason, and which consequently is in French with English subtitles. It was of course a French TV series - Le Chevalier Tempête - the Storm Knight, I guess? - made in 1967. For the uninitiated it concerns the siege of a fortress - Casale - by the Spanish, and the attempts of the French Chevalier de Recci, the Knight of the title, to get through Spanish lines to organise a relief force. It is in the tradition of Dumas and the Three Musketeers, with lots of swashbucking action.
I had thought that I remembered a lot about the series - the dashing raid into the Spanish lines, the escape disguised as lepers, the beautiful Lady Isabella and the villainous Don Alonzo, the fall into the river that the Chevalier recovers from, but re-watching it has been an interesting experience, as I clearly only understood about one third - maybe not even that much - of what was going on. What - they were captured by a Croatian bandit called The Voivode? I didn't remember that. It was all about a peace conference involving the Abbe (later to become Cardinal) Mazarin? It was set in northern Italy? The Chevalier disguised himself as Harlequin in a Commedia dell'Arte troupe? Wow.
The plot was much more involved than I remembered, and even as an adult I needed my wits about me to keep up - no wonder so little had registered on the 10-year old me. There is politics, double-dealing, intrigue, romance... it is clearly intended as a fairly adult series. I'm not quite sure what the BBC were thinking, scheduling it for children. Presumably it was cheap, and maybe bought as a job lot with Robinson Crusoe, which was also French.
As an amateur historian, more interesting for me was that much of the historical backdrop was reasonably real. In fact the siege of Casale Monferrato (in the series they actually use the beautiful and impressive Chateau Gaillard in Normandy as a stand-in for the besieged fortress) was a real event and part of the War of the Mantuan Succession, one of the myriad sub-conflicts that formed part of the larger Thirty Years War in Europe. It ran from 1628-1631 and was indeed ended by a peace brokered by Mazarin, at the time a Papal envoy, and guaranteed by the Duchy of Savoy, where most of the action in the series takes place.
Mazarin is an interesting character. He was later the replacement for Cardinal Richelieu as the Chief Minister of France, and is the foil of the last Musketeers novels - Twenty Years Later and The Viscount of Bracelonne. But in fact he was an Italian, studied as a Jesuit but never joined, became a lawyer, and had a brief career as an infantry captain with Montferrat in the War of the Mantuan Succession before ending up as a Papal envoy. He is portrayed in the series, as he probably was in real life, as an admirer of Richelieu and French supporter.
The series is also very good at portraying the dilemma of the small state (here Savoy) caught between two, or perhaps three superpowers - France, Spain, and the Papacy. The equivocating of the Count de Sospel - in the series Savoy's chancellor - is very well caught.
And also - it took me a while, but I eventually most definitely started to get this vibe - the series also features French agents hiding people in barns and smuggling them past the black-clad Spanish troops, secret rendezvouses, betrayals... it's essentially a little play on the French Resistance, told only 20 years after the real thing. There's a bit in Episode 9 where the Maquis are basically delaying the Wehrmacht to let the British agents get to safety. It was at that point that the penny dropped. Of course, in the spirit of the nascent European Union, the actual Germans in the series are represented by a heroic mercenary captain, Kleist, who is on the French side, and who dies a noble death fighting for them.
So... what to make of The Flashing Blade? For all of its cheap 60s production values, it was clearly a fairly serious series, with French-Canadian, Belgian and Swiss money involved as well as French. It can easily hold its head up alongside offerings like the BBC's more recent Musketeers. It certainly didn't belong as children's holiday viewing, but instead, re-watching it, I was surprised how good it actually was. Maybe something of that impinged itself on my young mind. I'm certainly glad to have made its reacquaintance.
